Final Reflection

1. Read through all of my previous posts.

2. I think the most formative experience for me throughout this semester for this class was doing the reading reflection assignments. I think it really helped me form the mentality of what an entrepreneur stands for in the world and how they can come from different backgrounds and take on different ventures that ultimately allow them to succeed. I enjoy reading in general and the books that I chose for my reading were very influential because they can be applied to a lot of different situations besides entrepreneurship.

I think my most joyous experience was performing the elevator pitches for the class. I've never been someone that likes to be in front of the camera and speak, but the way I had to craft my elevator pitches around myself and around my venture made it extremely fun to do. I was working on what words sound best and how it would flow and various other little things that make an elevator pitch extremely effective in the professional world.

3.  I think I have moved closer to developing the entrepreneurial mindset. I don't think I see myself as one yet, but I'm starting to develop the mindset of looking at opportunities in the real world and how I could potentially take advantage of them with my skillset. I think becoming an entrepreneur takes years and years of development before you can consider yourself one, but I believe I am on the right path.

4. I would say one recommendation for this class would be to really look back at the feedback you get from your peers for this class. It was extremely beneficial for me because it made me think about certain things that I wasn't thinking about during the process and how I could make changes to this idea or that idea. I would also say to really take this class seriously because it will help you create that entrepreneurial mindset for yourself that you can use in your future endeavors.

 

Venture Concept No. 2

Opportunity

As a student and a season-ticket holder for football games, the unmet need I identified was the Gator Student Ticketing Office lacking the software to track and reprint lost or stolen tickets for students that purchase tickets through them. I was one of these many students that were unfortunate to lose one of their tickets before a game early in the season. However, the primary target of this opportunity is the ticketing office because they are the people I will be presenting the solution to solve the unmet need for my secondary consumer, University of Florida students that purchase football tickets through the ticketing office. Currently, the only way to 'satisfy' the need is for students to either not attend the games after losing a ticket or purchase another one from the ticketing office or another student which can be costly in the end. The size of this opportunity can keep growing past what the initial target is as other ticketing offices at other universities around the country can implement this system into their ticketing software that will allow students to have their tickets reprinted if they are lost or stolen. I believe when it comes to the "window of opportunity" for the venture concept can stay open for as long as the ticketing office doesn't implement a system to track tickets and have them reprinted if they are lost or stolen by students on campus. However, I believe that jumping through that window sooner than later because they could be working with someone or developing the feature in-house to solve the issue that has been affecting them for a long time now.

The changes of the environment when it comes to solving this unmet need would be changing the process of how the ticketing office hands out the tickets when students come to pick them up during the week leading up to the game. The process will involve them scanning the tickets into the system after they have swiped your ID card to check for tickets. Those tickets are attached to your account after they scan them. Now, the tickets are 'attached' to your student ID card and if you were to lose your tickets before the game, you could go to the ticketing office, hand them your ID card and they will reprint the tickets off for you. This will remove the issue of students having to buy new tickets form the office or another student on campus that is no longer attending the game.

Innovation

The software that I am introducing isn't innovating to ticketed events as a lot of places that have a ticketing system also including a way for the tickets to be tracked and reprinted if they are every lost or stolen. I understand this because I work at a performing arts box office and we have a system for customers to contact us and have their tickets reprinted for whatever reason like if they lost them or the mail failed to deliver them or anything else. The plan for this opportunity is to work with a team on developing a software feature that can be implemented in the Gator Student Ticketing Office software that can attach football tickets to students ID's and be able to reprint those tickets if they are ever lost or stolen by the students at the University of Florida.

Venture Concept

The innovation that I am proposing will be solving the issue of the Gator Student Ticketing Office having to deal with students that have purchased football tickets through them and having lost them after picking them up. As of right now, the ticketing office doesn't have a proper solution to the issue besides telling the students to either find the lost ticket, buy a new one from them, or buy an unclaimed or claimed ticket from another student on campus. Not only that, but we plan to provide the service to all sporting events offered at the University of Florida. While the ticketing office will serve as the primary target audience of this innovation, the students that purchase tickets are the secondary target audience because they will benefit from the innovation that I am offering as they will no longer have to worry about buying another ticket if they were to lose their previous one before a game. They will be able to go to the ticketing office and have them reprint the ticket they lost as it is connected to their UF ID card. I believe the ticketing office would be quick to adopt this feature as it will help improve that customer relationship they have with the students and provide a 'safety net' for them if they were ever to lose their tickets in the future. At first, it could be difficult to train employees on the process, but it will become second-nature to them during the deployment process. As for competitors, their current software provider could be working on developing this feature for them to implement in the future, but also other teams that might be looking into pitching this software feature to them to implement. I would organize the 'business' as a small to work on the initial development of the project, but as it grows and time goes on, an expansion will be important for us to be able to provide sufficient support for the project.

Three Minor Elements

For the first element, I believe the most important resource to follow during the development process is to stay simple and continue working diligently despite running into speedbumps during the development process of the opportunity.


For the second element, I believe the next opportunity in line for the innovation is to start expanding the software feature to other ticketing offices around the state of Florida to continuously grow and develop the software to be as efficient as possible. We would then look into expanding nationwide to different colleges and universities around the country.

For the third element, I would like to see the software implemented at the majority of all major universities around the country and into multiple sporting programs like softball, basketball, and soccer. I think it is important to continuously expand the scope of the business to remain successful in the long run.

Feedback

Regarding the feedback I got from my first venture concept, neither of the two students had any negative feedback or concerns regarding it. They were both pretty supportive of the venture concept and were interested in how it would progress after this class is over with. However, I went back to my "What's Next?" post and read over it again for any changes that I could make to the concept. One of the people that I interviewed in the post stated that we should look into expanding it to other sporting events at the University of Florida because they mentioned they have lost a ticket for one of the basketball games. Since he already claimed a ticket under his ID, he wasn't able to claim another and had to look on the Facebook page for an unclaimed ticket.

The Changes

The changes I made from the feedback were minimal, but I altered the service from just being provided to the Gator Student Ticketing Office for football to being provided to all of the sporting events that are offered here at the University of Florida. There might be other changes that I could make to the venture concept, but I don't want to make any unnecessary changes that I might not need if the venture concept is good the way it is.

Your Exit Strategy

1. I believe the proper exit strategy for me would be stepping down as the CEO of the company that is running my venture and serving as a consultant for them. As the venture in question aims to provide the Gator Student Ticketing Office with the right software so that they will be able to reprint lost student tickets through their UF identification cards, it would be important to me to continue working for the company and continue to be involved with it in the long run. However, I think at a certain point that I should step down and let new blood to come in and take the reins from to see if they will be able to continue to expand the company more.
2. As I stated above, at a certain point in the life cycle for the company, new blood needs to come in and take control of the company to drive it past where it stalemates at. However, I would like to remain as a consultant for the company to continually help them drive forward and guide them in certain situations that I could have expertise and knowledge in.
3. I believe it has influenced the growth decisions for the business because, with the venture, we are just aiming to remain local to the Gator Student Ticketing Office. However, we plan to expand across the state to other universities and so on until we can hit it nationally. I think at the point that we hit across the state of Florida and the outlying regions, I would want to take a step back from the CEO role and choose to become a consultant and potentially chase other ventures in the free time. After that would be left for the new blood to come in and decide whether the plans to move nationally we’ll be worth the cost and manpower.

Reading Reflection No. 3

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big – Scott Adams

1. The general theme of the book is about the life story of Scott Adams and the lessons that he has learned from his entrepreneurial endeavors in the world. Not only does he talk about the lessons that he has learned, but also all of the failures that he has encountered that led to eventual success and winning big.
2. I believe the biggest lesson that I learned from this book that enhanced what I have been learning from this class is that failure is inevitable in life and you will always end up failing at something. However, how you react to that failure is up to you and will have an impact on how successful you will be in the future after that failure. I think that was an important lesson for me because we are all taught that failing is bad, and we should avoid failing at all costs, but the lessons that we learn from failing are just as important because it teaches us the post-failure thought process and how we respond to that failure in the future.
3. An assignment that I would design for this class would be like one we already have is the “Celebrating Failure” assignment. However, I would adjust the assignment from something that we have already failed at and how we felt about it afterward to trying something that we haven’t experienced or done before, failing at it, and what our thought process is after we have failed at it. I think the task of doing something that we have never done before, failing at it, and seeing how we reacted to it is important for us to learn that not everything we are going to immediately good at and failure is to be expected in certain situations.
4. For this book, the ‘aha’ moment for me was the lesson from Scott Adams that instead of building goals for our lives that we should build systems. This stood out to me because everyone has goals they want to accomplish and hope to do so in the future. Scott Adams talked about goals having two inherent flaws in them as one, they are in the future, and two, they are specific. When it comes to the future portion, goals are set at an unknown date for us and without having that ‘system’ of having it done on this certain day can be depressing. For the specific portion, when we set goals, they are clearly defined by us and if we don’t reach that exact definition for the goal, it can be disappointing for us. Adams states that with systems, we are able to adjust the plans within them and that each day of accomplishing a part of the system is a success for you.

Celebrating Failure

1. As a person that Is in the gym four to five days a week, failure is something that you must learn to live with because it happens almost every day for us. You’re either unable to quite hit that max lift that you have been aiming for the past couple months or you can’t hit a certain amount of repetitions on a set. For me, right before the semester began, I was able to hit 315 pounds for my bench press max. It was also right before I left for Germany to see my sister before the fall semester started. I was ecstatic because I have been recovering from a surgery from last May that has prevented me from working out effectively up until this past summer. A labral tear in your shoulder really is one of the worse injuries that I have ever had to my body. However, after I returned from Germany, I couldn’t hit anywhere near on bench than what I did right before I left. It put me in a serious slump that messed with my confidence for a bit that I was gone for a little over a week and I could barely do the sets that lead up to my one-rep max. It is disheartening to fail at something that you have successfully done in the past and getting stuck in that cycle of failure.
2. I decided to take a step back from my current workout regiment for chest day and research some potential solutions that I could use to help solve my problem. On Youtube, I’m a fan of Jeremy Ethier, a Youtuber that is a graduate student in Kinesiology from Canada that posts scientific-based workout and therapeutic exercises to improve your body. I reviewed his chest-based video and adopted his exercises into my current program along with adding more lightweight exercises as a build-up to increase strength. I spent around a month working through the program that I built for myself from my experience and Ethier’s recommendations. I started to see improvements slowly come from working through the regiment. My shoulder slows down my progress a bit because of the extensive amount of damage that was done when I dislocated it and tore the labrum around the socket. However, I was able to return my max bench press up to 315 pounds recently, but I was also able to increase the number of repetitions I was able to do at 225 pounds from around 10-12 to 20 repetitions. What I learned from this is:
1. Do not let failure and the roadblocks that come with it discourage you from achieving what you want to achieve.
2. Sometimes, you need to take a step back and reevaluate what you are doing and researching a better method of doing things to improve your chances of succeeding next time.
3. Don’t mess up your shoulder because the recovery process is long and painful.
3. Failure is embarrassing to some, but I believe I see it as an opportunity to learn from the failure to improve yourself in the future. For me, I see failure as a love-hate relationship because when you fail at something, you despise it for what it is in the moment, but after going back and understanding why you failed and fixing the mistakes or adjusting what you are doing, you love to see yourself to be able to overcome it the next go around.

What's Next?

Existing Market

Step 1: The next step for this venture is to look into expanding to other colleges and universities around the state that don't have a similar software feature implemented into their ticketing offices for their sports programs. If we want to be successful as a business, we can't be complacent with where we are right now. We need to be looking into what we can do with our service and what kind of opportunities are available to us. After we have become comfortable with testing the software at the University of Florida, we will look into approaching other colleges and universities across the state to pitch our software to them.

Step 2: I decided to sit down with two people that I interviewed previously about the opportunity I originally presented to them, Hannah and Chad. The third person I sat down with for these set interviews was a new person that I haven't interviewed before, Lucas, who used to work at the ticketing office in the past. Since they are all students that have attended football games in the past or will attend in the future, they fall within my primary and secondary target audience and will see a lot of the benefits from the implementation of my service at the Gator Student Ticketing Office.

I sat down with each of them separately to figure out the question "What should we be doing that we aren't planning on doing?" Chad brought up that I could look into expanding the service to other sporting events even though they are free events. He mentioned that he lost a basketball ticket and since he already claimed one before the game, he wasn't able to claim another one nor have his old ticket reprinted. Hannah couldn't think of much about what we could be planning to do in the future of the business but could look into providing safety nets for students that buy tickets from other students to prevent issues like fraudulent tickets being sold to them. Lucas brought up what I was thinking beforehand about expanding to other schools around the state and country once the system has become stable and there is sufficient support to maintain the software.

Step 3: When it comes to growing the service to others around the state and across the country, I think the issue that we need to keep in mind is to not grow too fast that it becomes too much of a burden to operate and starts costing us more than it is making for us. What I will look at is a timeline of where we should be with our service currently and where we should be in the future and figure out an efficient plan to make those targets for the business. I still want to expand to other universities around the country, but I believe we will need to be realistic and limit ourselves until we were ready for it.

Along with that, we will look into perfecting the software while we remain 'local' at the University of Florida and make sure that it is perfect to work here. We will then continue adding safeguards and features that truly benefit both the primary and secondary target audience of the software. We will try to avoid becoming too comfortable with what we are doing and try to continuously innovate our product to be the best it can be.

 

New Market

Step 1: For the new market, I decided to talk to two employees that currently work at the Gator Student Ticketing Office about my venture and the potential I have since they will be the people that work with the software feature on a daily basis when handing out tickets.

Step 2: I believe the value that the employees will see from the software is that it will improve the customer service experience for the students that pick-up tickets from the ticketing office and have them reprinted if they are lost or stolen. It is hard to find a drastically different target market because the specifics of this opportunity and limitations that come with it.

The hard part of seeing how much value this will provide to the employees depends on how each employee cares about customer service and how much of an impact that they will have on the students that have their tickets reprinted after losing them. This will be a business-to-business focus so the amount of value when it is first introduced to them is less than how much value is added later on once they are using the software feature and dealing with lost tickets.

Step 3: The two employees that I sat down with that work at the Gator Student Ticketing Office were interested in my venture concept that I proposed to them and how it would be implemented into the system they are currently using. Both stated that they always wondered why there wasn't a system already in place that can track lost tickets for students because the tickets aren't exactly cheap compared to other universities across the state that have free tickets for football like the University of Central Florida.

I explained to them on how the process will work when it comes to attaching the tickets to the student's UFID card and how they would be tracked if they were lost or stolen from that student. They mentioned that it sounds like a good idea because it is common for students to lose their tickets after picking them up and there isn't anything they can do because there is no way of finding it for them. The only issue they brought up is that it could take time to train staff on the new system and when it gets busy, it could slow down the ticket dispersal process. However, they felt that it would be valuable for them because the students they serve would be happy to find that they don't have to worry about buying a new ticket if they lose theirs.

Step 4: I think what surprised me the most about this target market is the amount of support and interest both of the interviewees's that I sat down and talked about it with. Since they are actual employees at the ticketing office and deal with the software on almost a daily basis, I thought it was encouraging to hear that they liked the venture that I proposed for them. As for my expectations, I was correct with them before I interviewed them and what I expected to hear. I have worked in the service industry for a long time now and it is nice to be able to provide good customer service to people and for them to be happy with the overall experience.

As for the attraction of the new market, I think it is on par for my venture that I am proposing. They are a good target audience that I could take advantage of with the venture. I believe they would be a good representation of the whole target market, but more research will have to be conducted to provide an accurate picture of what I will be working with this venture.

Venture Concept No. 1

Opportunity

As a student and a season-ticket holder for football games, the unmet need I identified was the Gator Student Ticketing Office lacking the software to track and reprint lost or stolen tickets for students that purchase tickets through them. I was one of these many students that were unfortunate to lose one of their tickets before a game early in the season. However, the primary target of this opportunity is the ticketing office because they are the people I will be presenting the solution to solve the unmet need for my secondary consumer, University of Florida students that purchase football tickets through the ticketing office. Currently, the only way to 'satisfy' the need is for students to either not attend the games after losing a ticket or purchase another one from the ticketing office or another student which can be costly in the end. The size of this opportunity can keep growing past what the initial target is as other ticketing offices at other universities around the country can implement this system into their ticketing software that will allow students to have their tickets reprinted if they are lost or stolen. I believe when it comes to the "window of opportunity" for the venture concept can stay open for as long as the ticketing office doesn't implement a system to track tickets and have them reprinted if they are lost or stolen by students on campus. However, I believe that jumping through that window sooner than later because they could be working with someone or developing the feature in-house to solve the issue that has been affecting them for a long time now.

The changes of the environment when it comes to solving this unmet need would be changing the process of how the ticketing office hands out the tickets when students come to pick them up during the week leading up to the game. The process will involve them scanning the tickets into the system after they have swiped your ID card to check for tickets. Those tickets are attached to your account after they scan them. Now, the tickets are 'attached' to your student ID card and if you were to lose your tickets before the game, you could go to the ticketing office, hand them your ID card and they will reprint the tickets off for you. This will remove the issue of students having to buy new tickets form the office or another student on campus that is no longer attending the game.

Innovation

The software that I am introducing isn't innovating to ticketed events as a lot of places that have a ticketing system also including a way for the tickets to be tracked and reprinted if they are every lost or stolen. I understand this because I work at a performing arts box office and we have a system for customers to contact us and have their tickets reprinted for whatever reason like if they lost them or the mail failed to deliver them or anything else. The plan for this opportunity is to work with a team on developing a software feature that can be implemented in the Gator Student Ticketing Office software that can attach football tickets to students ID's and be able to reprint those tickets if they are ever lost or stolen by the students at the University of Florida.

Venture Concept

The innovation that I am proposing will be solving the issue of the Gator Student Ticketing Office having to deal with students that have purchased football tickets through them and having lost them after picking them up. As of right now, the ticketing office doesn't have a proper solution to the issue besides telling the students to either find the lost ticket, buy a new one from them, or buy an unclaimed or claimed ticket from another student on campus. While the ticketing office will serve as the primary target audience of this innovation, the students that purchase tickets are the secondary target audience because they will benefit from the innovation that I am offering as they will no longer have to worry about buying another ticket if they were to lose their previous one before a game. They will be able to go to the ticketing office and have them reprint the ticket they lost as it is connected to their UF ID card. I believe the ticketing office would be quick to adopt this feature as it will help improve that customer relationship they have with the students and provide a 'safety net' for them if they were ever to lose their tickets in the future. At first, it could be difficult to train employees on the process, but it will become second-nature to them during the deployment process. As for competitors, their current software provider could be working on developing this feature for them to implement in the future, but also other teams that might be looking into pitching this software feature to them to implement. I would organize the 'business' as a small to work on the initial development of the project, but as it grows and time goes on, expansion will be important for us to be able to provide sufficient support for the project.

Three Minor Elements

For the first element, I believe the most important resource to follow during the development process is to stay simple and continue working diligently despite running into speedbumps during the development process of the opportunity.


For the second element, I believe the next opportunity in line for the innovation is to start expanding the software feature to other ticketing offices around the state of Florida to continously grow and develop the software to be as efficient as possible. We would then look into expanding nationwide to different colleges and universities around the country.

For the third element, I would like to see the software implemented at the majority of all major universities around the country and into multiple sporting programs like softball, basketball, and soccer. I think it is important to continously expanding the scope of the business to remain successful in the long run.